Comment by messe

You will be affected by the (hypothetical) fall of American hegemony, whether it’s increased aggression in spheres of influence (Russia, China, India), market failures, or even a fracturing or collapse of digital services (Azure, AWS).

I don’t understand the insistence that this isn’t on topic. Hard not to paint it as anything but willfully ignorant.

Despite the name, this isn't a community for only "hacker" articles. It's overall to promote curiosity and engage those curiosities. There is no hard "no politics" policy here. The spirit of the rule is to not turn this into a 24 hour real time report of the state of the world.

But this article isnt that. If you don't find any of the last years of happening this year curious at the bare minimum, I wonder how deeply aware someone really is of it.

>If you are not American, it’s rather tiring to have every website and news outlet talk about it ad nauseum

I'm sure greenland sees it as tiring too. But of there wasn't such a huge pushback, "tiring" would be the least of their concerns. Why can't we then have a deeper discussion after that to analyze how it came to this (and how to prevent it)? We sure can't have that discussion on Twitter.

Also, I'm pretty fundamentalist when it comes to posting on social media: if I don't like it, I don't click in. If I clicked into every AI buzzword post, I'd go insane. But others want it, who am I To judge? Certainly not a moderator. If you want me to moderate, we can discuss pay.

Then go ignore it on your country’s version of HN.

Close. Takes tenured accounts to unflag and any schmohawk can flag. That dicotomy alone makes things way more likely to be flagged on average.

> it isn’t mod actions

It's intentional inaction. From the mods.

This post, and many many others, ought to have been unflagged.

So, so, so many popular and active stories about Musk and DOGE and Trump have been removed this past year, while at the same time Garry Tan and PG were cheering them on on their Twitter feeds.

People who call this out too much get banned. For super unrelated reasons, apparently.

Dang has explicitly disallowed any and all posts talking about the weaknesses of the flag system. IT'S PROTECTED.

So the explanation for this removal condemning the ongoing fascist revolt in the US is where?

At least that's what it looks like to an outside observer from elsewhere in the world. It's been fascinating as an outsider to watch your republicans suddenly unsure about the second amendment after the last few days.

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The problem is that a relatively small group of people (flaggers) just veto what we see and don't see. This made sense when we relied on flagging to just remove spam, useless posts, etc. but its now being used to remove anything that goes against MAGA.

I'm pretty sure that if you sqldump the list of flaggers of this and other posts (like the MN posts) you will find it's not a uniformly distributed list of users.

It is a difficult issue. For the longest time, the status quo-favoring position of not complaining about anything divisive too much worked well because the status quo had been relatively unchanging - most people grew up with it so everyone took it for granted, and even most types of pushback was far more reserved than what we see today.

But now that the status quo of Western countries had begun rapidly shifting into something completely different, the other side of that initial ruling is starting to bear fruit. I really think that at this point they should revisit this policy - not to abandon moderation, but make amends that try to distance this place from the current political establishment. What was yesterday's implicit favoring of the boring consensus is now a defined position that's supportive of whatever the current powers do. But, being more cynical, given how close HN is to Y Combinator, I'm not sure if that option is on the table.

The main reason to avoid flamewars is to protect the atmosphere on HN but you can't make the case that if the world is on fire we can just sit here and pretend it isn't happening and discuss the latest tweak to react as though it is the most important thing in the world.

I've long argued for a 'other' category as one overflow method or a homepage that is generic and subject specific pages for those that only want LLM news or Apple. I'm sure we could agree on a 10 level 'top' set with 'All' the default. That's one step closer to Reddit of course, but with the growth that HN has seen over the years you can't continue to pretend that the 'small town' measures still apply to this big city. A lot of this really is just about scale and you need to adapt to scale.

We would have curtailed the AI discussion years ago of preventing flame wars was the primary issue. I do think that they simply cling to outdated sentiments that politics is "dirty laundry" to take out instead of properly cleaning hoise.

I've been frustrated by the flagging (because fascism is so real right now) but I've been a moderator in the past and I know it's impossible to keep a large majority happy. It's hard for me to criticize the mods much.

> the mods like to avoid anything involving "politics" since it's likely to start a flame war.

You're correct that we like to avoid flamewars, but not correct to say "anything involving politics". We don't try to (or want to) avoid politics altogether—a certain number of threads with political overlap have always been part of the mix here*. For (reams of) past explanations see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4922426.)

The limit should be outright fascism. It's not a tough line to draw if you've any inkling of 20th century history. The USA isn't sleepwalking, it's goose-stepping into a fucking nightmare.